Taking A Chance

The yard sale is over. Finally. Thankfully.

However, it didn’t go as well as I had hoped. After all the stress, hassle, extreme lack of sleep, worry, anger, frustration, and work, I still came home with 90% of the stuff I took down to sell. *Sigh* Somehow it didn’t seem worth it now.

Since I really didn’t sell all that much, I now still have a ton of crap to sort out for pitching, attempting to sell on Craigslist or something, taking to Goodwill or other outreach centers. I feel like I’m just right back to square one, having gained very little ground.

It’s depressing and discouraging.

It doesn’t help that someone refused to let me sell half my board games — the ones that WOULD have sold — and actually took and hid them on me before the sale even began. Some mature mother I have. Or the fact that I’m now wishing I hadn’t sold one of the items my dad bought me. I really don’t have much that he gives me, but I didn’t think I’d ever use the horse magnet set so I made myself put it out, and now I’m really regretting it. Even if it was useless, it was sentimental to me, and I’m really wishing I would have kept it now.

Anyways, yard sale fail beside the point, after sleeping for ten hours to try to catch up to exhaustion. (Still didn’t work, woke up with a headache the next day that lasted all day.) I finally got myself back into writing after that week of no writing from running around like a chicken with no head.

This week isn’t going to end any better than last week was on that scale though, so that might take another blow.

I started working on Fated to Darkness again on Sunday, finished off a chapter, started the next. Even managed to get 4k written that day among blog hops, scheduling snippets, and a lot of other things. Monday afternoon at work though, while talking to a coworker, my Facebook popped up a notification that someone posted in the Sunday Snippet group.

Odd, I thought to myself. It’s normally only Saturday’s and Sunday’s I see those notifications pop up considering what the group is.

Out of curiosity I went to see what it was and found an opening for a chance at publication. Mind you, when I say a chance at publication I am talking a sort of contest, so I don’t have the greatest odds more than likely.

The post was letting us Snippeteers know that a certain publishing agency that puts out four anthologies a year was taking submissions for the Halloween/Fall and Christmas/New Year publications.

I got really excited by that. More so the Halloween/Fall anthology because that is my favorite time of the year.

Now I had never attempted to submit anything before to any sort of contest or publication opportunity — at least not this big scale, I’ve tried the Watty Awards on Wattpad, but… *Shrugs* — so the idea both scared me and made me excitement. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it.

And the more I wanted to give it a shot, the quicker the plot bunny came hopping along into my head for a Halloween tale.

Within a couple hours of seeing that post, I had decided I was going for it.

For the rest of the shift, I was the crazy author who was carrying around a pen and paper on the sales floor as I worked, muttering to myself as I plotted and jotting down all that came to me so I wouldn’t forget it. I couldn’t wait to get home to start writing it. I was like a kid in a candy store in excitement. Could not wipe the wide grin off my face.

I still can’t believe I’m trying for this, but so far the story is coming along perfectly.

The deadline is August 20th which gives me eleven days to finish this and send it in. (Ten now really.) I’m not good at romance, but there has to be an aspect of romance to the story. For once I think I might have managed to wrangle a decent tale of love together. The story has to be between 5k and 20k words and currently I am 400 words away from hitting the minimum.

For once, I think I’m going to manage to keep something relatively short. (I know, shocking.) A bit of editing might change that once I finish the little tale, but I think I may not be more than 7k words or so. I even have a title for it already! And characters’ names! It’s a miracle!

Of course, my one MC is twisting the story in a direction I did not expect it to go, but I think it actually works out better that way. I even know what the ending looks like!

So it’s coming along quite nicely and I hope to have it finished by the end of this week so I can take a few days to poke around editing it before I send it in. (Gods that’s a scary thought.) I doubt I really have any odds on this. I mean, I have no idea how many submissions they get, or what kind of authors are sending stories in. They’re probably all published authors already and then here’s me…

Okay, I’m psyching myself out. Let’s not think of that and just focus on writing it so I can send it.

Wait, writing…

Deodamnatus. I was supposed to write my catch up Shard today. Welp, guess I’m writing that the rest of the night instead of working on this little tale. In the midst of a splitting headache that just came out of nowhere, too.

Wonderful.